Today I will be showing one of the most complete and sophisticated chocolate shops in Venezuela. But first, let's talk a little about the main cocoa item with which this candy is manufactured, which is recognized worldwide.

Let's start.

Historical background

The history of cocoa in Latin America and especially in Venezuela has nuances that go from the aboriginal customs of using the cocoa bean as a currency and then ending up as a ritual drink and for preparing gastronomic dishes, to the slavery of the Africans who were in charge of cultivating and collecting the cocoa harvest to prepare or send the beans to Europe to make chocolate.

For example in the Aztec empire they kidnapped the emperor called Cuauhtémoc, in historical accounts it is known that Hernán cortez representative of the Spanish invasion ordered Cuauhtémoc to hand over his fortune, when the emperor gave the coordinates to the army Hernán cortez received cocoa seeds, the Spanish invader thought that the Aztec emperor was mocking and ordered that his feet be burned immediately as a punishment.

This shows how the aboriginal peoples before the arrival of the Spanish held cocoa in high esteem as one of the most important riches, other currencies of exchange were bananas and corn. It is ironic the contrast between the European societies that had gold as their supreme exchange value. I will not go into detail on this subject but it seems to me more intelligent to have as a bargaining chip a foodstuff than a metal that cannot be consumed because it is toxic to human beings.

Chocolate

Although in many pages there are stories about the origin of chocolate, all peoples of America share cocoa as a food of vital importance, in most history books we will find that the origin of chocolate is Mexican and is attributed to a legend even in where the god Quetzalcoatl gives men the cocoa tree, the Mexican people called it tchocolatl which is the unification of two words in the Nahuatl language Xococ (sour) and alt which means water.

Globalized Chocolate

With the arrival of the Spanish invaders and after tasting the chocolate they saw the economic attraction, but the Portuguese invaders also present in Latin America appropriated for a good time the trade routes of cocoa and primitive chocolate towards Europe, after several years of experimenting with the cocoa they discovered the cocoa butter extracted by presses, and thus begins the production of chocolates a novelty that was already in the European palates during the 21st and 20th century when the chocolate stops being liquid to begin the long road of tempered techniques. Techniques that the Mesoamerican aborigines had already discovered 800 years before Christ, there are even records of the manufacture of alcoholic beverages based on the pulp that surrounds the cocoa beans.

Noble Chocolate

If you're thinking why I didn't talk about the chocolate store from the beginning of this publication, it's because there are historical facts that are extremely important to me to highlight since eating chocolate is a unique and delicious experience, so it's worth reading a few lines to get into context instead of showing a store that only sells chocolates.

In December 2019 I visited for the first time the chocolate factory Noble located in the historic center of the city of Caracas a few meters away from the birthplace of the liberator of America Simon Bolivar, on that occasion I was only a few minutes giving a tour of the store without paying much attention to all the brands offered by the store. However, I decided to leave it written down in my notes as a place to discover through the steem blockchain.

The chocolate factory was opened in October 2019, its owners had the goal of opening a store selling Venezuelan national brands of chocolate, this is very new since we are talking about Venezuela, the country with an inflation of 1,000,000 %, the crises are useful to undertake, and this seems to me one of the best initiatives as it brings together more than 40 brands of Venezuelan chocolate houses, some of them with more than a century of existence, other companies have just started in the chocolate business.